At the conclusion of these 18 essays that bluntly outline the crises and explain a Green New Deal response, Klein bolsters readers searching for hope: “[W]hen the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.” It is tempting to embrace that claim, especially after nearly 300 pages of Klein’s eloquent writing that weaves insightful analysis together with honest personal reflection.

The problem, of course, is that the statement is not even close to being true. With nearly 8 billion people living within a severely degraded ecosphere, there are many things we cannot, and will not, achieve. A decent human future—perhaps any human future at all—depends on our ability to come to terms with these limits. That is not a celebration of cynicism or a rationalization for nihilism, but rather the starting point for rational planning that takes seriously not only our potential but also the planet’s biophysical constraints.

Klein’s essays in this volume make it clear that she is well aware of those limits, but the book’s subtitle suggests that she is writing not only to inform but also to mobilize support for Green New Deal proposals. This tension runs throughout the book—when Klein reports on and analyzes the state of the world, the prose challenges readers to face difficult realities, but when making the case for those policy proposals, she sounds more like an organizer rallying supporters.

That’s not a dig—Klein is a writer who doesn’t sit on the sidelines but gets involved with movements and political projects. Her commitment to activism and organizing is admirable, but it can pull a writer in conflicting directions.

This critique should not lead anyone to ignore On Fire, which is an excellent book that should be read cover to cover, without skipping chapters that had been previously published. Collections of essays can fall flat because of faded timeliness or unnecessary repetition, but neither are a problem here. As always, Klein’s sharp eye for detail makes her reporting on events compelling, whether she’s describing disasters (natural and unnatural) or assessing political trends. And, despite the grim realities we face, the book is a pleasure to read.

Before explaining concerns with the book’s inspirational tone, I want to emphasize key points Klein makes that I agree are essential to a left/progressive analysis of the ecological crises:

First-World levels of consumption are unsustainable;

capitalism is incompatible with a livable human future;

the modern industrial world has undermined people’s connections to each other and the non-human world; and

we face not only climate disruption but a host of other crises, including, but not limited to, species extinction, chemical contamination, and soil erosion and degradation.

In other words, business-as-usual is a dead end, which Klein states forthrightly:

I feel confident in saying that a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed. We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the “other” fundamentally reshape us.

On Fire focuses primarily on the climate crisis and the Green New Deal’s vision, which is widely assailed as too radical by the two different kinds of climate-change deniers in the United States today—one that denies the conclusions of climate science and another that denies the implications of that science. The first, based in the Republican Party, is committed to a full-throated defense of our pathological economic system. The second, articulated by the few remaining moderate Republicans and most mainstream Democrats, imagines that market-based tinkering to mitigate the pathology is adequate.

Thankfully, other approaches exist. The most prominent in the United States is the Green New Deal’s call for legislation that recognizes the severity of the ecological crises while advocating for economic equality and social justice. Supporters come from varied backgrounds, but all are happy to critique and modify, or even scrap, capitalism. Avoiding dogmatic slogans or revolutionary rhetoric, Klein writes realistically about moving toward a socialist (or, perhaps, socialist-like) future, using available tools involving “public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation” to steer out of the existing debacle.

One of the strengths of Klein’s blunt talk about the social and ecological problems in the context of real-world policy proposals is that she speaks of motion forward in a long struggle rather than pretending the Green New Deal is the solution for all our problems. On Firemakes it clear that there are no magic wands to wave, no magic bullets to fire.

The problem is that the Green New Deal does rely on one bit of magical thinking—the techno-optimism that emerges from the modern world’s underlying technological fundamentalism, defined as the faith that the use of evermore advanced technology is always a good thing. Extreme technological fundamentalists argue that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. (If anyone thinks this definition a caricature, read “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”)

Klein does not advocate such fundamentalism, but that faith hides just below the surface of the Green New Deal, jumping out in “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” which Klein champions in On Fire. Written by U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (the most prominent legislator advancing the Green New Deal) and Avi Lewis (Klein’s husband and collaborator), the seven-and-a-half minute video elegantly combines political analysis with engaging storytelling and beautiful visuals. But one sentence in that video reveals the fatal flaw of the analysis: “We knew that we needed to save the planet and that we had all the technology to do it [in 2019].”

First, talk of saving the planet is misguided. As many have pointed out in response to that rhetoric, the Earth will continue with or without humans. Charitably, we can interpret that phrase to mean, “reducing the damage that humans do to the ecosphere and creating a livable future for humans.” The problem is, we don’t have all technology to do that, and if we insist that better gadgets can accomplish that, we are guaranteed to fail.

Reasonable people can, and do, disagree about this claim. (For example, “The science is in,” proclaims the Nature Conservancy, and we can have a “future in which catastrophic climate change is kept at bay while we still power our developing world” and “feed 10 billion people.”) But even accepting overly optimistic assessments of renewable energy and energy-saving technologies, we have to face that we don’t have the means to maintain the lifestyle that “A Message from the Future” promises for the United States, let alone the entire world. The problem is not just that the concentration of wealth leads to so much wasteful consumption and wasted resources, but that the infrastructure of our world was built by the dense energy of fossil fuels that renewables cannot replace. Without that dense energy, a smaller human population is going to live in dramatically different fashion.

Welcome to the third rail of contemporary political life. The question that the multiple, cascading ecological crises put squarely in front of us is, “What is a sustainable human population?” That question has to be split in two: “How many people? Consuming how much?”

It’s no surprise that political candidates ignore these questions, but progressive writers and activists should not back away. Honestly engaging these issues takes us well beyond the Green New Deal.

On the second of those questions—“consuming how much?”—Klein frequently highlights the problem, but with a focus on “profligate consumption.” She stresses the need to:

“scale back overconsumption”;

identify categories in which we must contract, “including air travel, meat consumption, and profligate energy use”; [I do wish people would get off the back of meat consumption and point the finger at industrial scale agriculture instead…]

end “the high-carbon lifestyle of suburban sprawl and disposable consumption”;

reject capitalism’s faith in “limitless consumption” that locks us in “the endless consumption cycle”; and

make deep changes “not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system.”

No argument with any of those statements, especially because Klein rejects the notion that simply improving efficiency will solve our problems, a common assumption of the techno-optimists. But challenging “overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy” focuses on the easy target: “The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume.”

My goal is not to defend rich people or their consumption habits. However, constraining the lifestyles of the rich and famous is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sustainability. Here we have to deal with the sticky question of human nature. Klein rightly rejects capitalism’s ideological claim that people’s capacity to act out of greed and short-term self-interest (which all of us certainly are capable of doing) is the dominant human trait. Human nature also includes the capacity to act out of compassion in solidarity with others, of course, and different systems reward different parts of our nature. Capitalism encourages the greed and discourages the compassion, to the detriment of people and planet.

But we are organic creatures, and that means there is a human nature, or what we might more accurately call our human-carbon nature. As Wes Jackson of The Land Institute puts it, life on Earth is “the scramble for energy-rich carbon,” and humans have gotten exceedingly good at grabbing lots of carbon. Not all cultures go after it with the same intensity, of course, but that scramble predates capitalism and will continue after capitalism. This doesn’t mean we are condemned to make the planet unlivable for ourselves and other creatures, but public policy has to recognize that we not only need carbon to survive but that most people—including most environmentalists—like the work that carbon can do for us when we burn those fossil fuels. And once we get a taste of what that carbon can do, it’s not easy to give it up.

As Klein points out, curbing our carbon-seeking is not merely a test of will power and matter of individual virtue; collective action through public policy is needed. I believe that requires a hard cap on carbon—limits that we can encourage people to accept through cultural advocacy but in the end must be imposed through law. A sensible approach, called “cap and adapt,” has been proposed by Larry Edwards and Stan Cox. In a forthcoming book, Cox will expand on a cap-and-ration strategy that could help in “drawing the human economy back within necessary ecological limits,” a follow-up to, and expansion of, his earlier book that made a compelling case for a rationing.

There’s no simple answer to how much energy and material resources we can consume without undermining the ecosystems on which our own lives depend, but I’m confident in saying that it’s dramatically less that we consume today, and that reducing aggregate consumption—even if we could create equitable societies—will be difficult. But that’s the easy part. Much more difficult is the first question—“how many people?”

The fact that these questions are troubling and/or impossible to answer does not mean the questions do not matter. For now, my answer—a lot fewer people and a lot less stuff—is adequate to start a conversation: “A sustainable human presence on the planet will mean fewer people consuming less.” Agree or disagree? Why or why not?

Two responses are possible from Green New Deal supporters: (1) I’m nuts, or (2) I’m not nuts, but what I’m suggesting is politically impossible because people can’t handle all this bad news.

If I am nuts, critics have to demonstrate what is unsound about the argument, without resorting to the cliché that “necessity is the mother of invention” and the faith-based claims of the technological fundamentalists.

If I am not, then those Green supporters face a quandary. When mainstream Democrats tell progressive folks that the Green New Deal is doomed to fail because it is not politically viable at this moment, supporters counter, appropriately, by saying that anything less is inadequate in the face of the crises. Those supporters argue, appropriately, that the real failure is supporting policies that don’t do enough to create sustainable human societies and that we need to build a movement for the needed change. I agree, but by that logic, if the Green New Deal itself is inadequate to create sustainability, then we must push further.

The Green New Deal is a start, insufficiently radical but with the potential to move the conversation forward—if we can be clear about the initiative’s limitations. That presents a problem for organizers, who seek to rally support without uncomfortable caveats—“Support this plan! But remember that it’s just a start, and it gets a lot rougher up ahead, and whatever we do may not be enough to stave off unimaginable suffering” is, admittedly, not a winning slogan.

Back to what I think Klein is right about, and eloquent in expressing:

Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair.

The domination/subordination dynamic that creates so much suffering within the human family also defines the modern world’s destructive relationship to the larger living world. Throughout the book, Klein presses the importance of telling a new story about all those relationships. Scientific data and policy proposals matter, but they don’t get us far without a story for people to embrace. Klein is right, and On Fire helps us imagine a new story for a human future.

I offer a friendly amendment to the story she is constructing: Our challenge is to highlight not only what we can but also what we cannot accomplish, to build our moral capacity to face a frightening future but continue to fight for what can be achieved, even when we know that won’t be enough.

One story I would tell is of the growing gatherings of people, admittedly small in number today, who take comfort in saying forthrightly what they believe, no matter how painful—people who do not want to suppress their grief, yet do not let their grief overwhelm them.

What kind of person wants to live like that? I can offer a real-life example, my late friend Jim Koplin. He once told me, in a conversation about those multiple, cascading ecological crises (a term I stole from him, with his blessing), “I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief.” He was neither depressed nor irrational but simply honest. Jim, a Depression-era farm boy who had been permanently radicalized in the 1960s, felt that grief more deeply than anyone I have known, yet every day he got up to work in his garden and then offer his time and energy to a variety of political, community, and arts groups that were fighting for a better world.

Klein speaks of this grief in On Fire, in what for me were the most moving passages, often involving her young son’s future in the face of this “planetary death spiral”:

There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with [Toma] and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.

The escape from loneliness, for me, starts with recognizing that Jim’s “state of profound grief” was not only wholly rational but also emotionally healthy. When told that even if this harsh assessment is correct, people can’t handle it, I agree. No one can handle all this. Jim couldn’t handle it every waking minute. I don’t handle it as well as he did. At best, we struggle to come to terms with a “bleak and austere” future.

But that’s exactly why we need to engage rather than avoid the distressing realities of our time. If we are afraid to speak honestly, we suffer alone. Better that we tell the truth and accept the consequences, together.

This morning on the news, we were woken up to the fact we could be facing gas shortages in Australia. And because more and more electricity is generated with this fuel (Tasmania and South Australia immediately come to mind), the repercussions could be electricity rationing, as well as gas for heating and cooking.

An assessment from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is warning that, without a swift response, Australia could face a difficult choice — keeping the power on versus cutting gas supplies to residential and business customers.

“If we do nothing, we’re going to see shortfalls in gas, we’re going to see shortfalls in electricity,” AEMO chief operating officer Mike Cleary said.

The analysis said without new development to support more gas-powered electricity generation, modelling showed supply shortfalls of between 80 gigawatt hours and 363 gigawatt hours could be expected from summer 2018/19 until 2020/21.

It’s not like we weren’t warned…… I wrote about this almost three years ago…. at the time, I quoted Matt Mushalik…: “In July 2006 then Prime Minister Howard declared Australia an energy super power. Two years earlier his energy white paper set the framework for unlimited gas exports while neglecting to set aside gas for domestic use”

Australia, the world’s second-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, needs to remove road blocks to gas exploration on the east coast that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blames for a looming domestic supply crisis.

“We are facing an energy crisis in Australia because of this restriction of gas,” Turnbull told a business conference in Sydney on Thursday. “Gas reserves or gas resources are not the issue. The biggest problem at the moment is the political opposition from state governments to it being exploited.”

Hang on a minute…… if we are indeed the world’s second biggest gas exporter, why do we need more exploration (code for really dirty coal seam gas)..? And if we are exporting so much gas, why can’t we cut down on the exports, and keep some for ourselves?

I smell a rat…….

According to Bloomberg again……

Origin Energy Ltd, Australia’s largest electricity company, on Tuesday said Queensland gas intended for LNG exports to Asia may be diverted to ease an expected supply shortfall this winter.

So there’s no problem then…?

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, owner of the $20 billion Queensland Curtis LNG development, said in an emailed statement that its QGC Ltd. subsidiary will continue to make gas available “where we have the capacity to do so.”

So there’s capacity for export but not for domestic use…. and the hogwash continues at full speed with more statements like “Energy security has come under scrutiny since a state-wide blackout in September hit South Australia, the mainland state most reliant on renewable energy generation. Turnbull’s conservative leaning government called the state “utterly complacent” due to its over reliance on renewable energy following a partial blackout in February, whilst later attacking other left-leaning state governments for similar ambitions.” Oh I get it now….. it’s the renewables’ fault that we are short on gas. And what on Earth is a left leaning state? You mean like Queensland’s ALP government going full steam ahead to support Adani’s project for the world’s largest coal mine..?

Give me a break Malcolm…. this is all your greedy lot’s fault, you damn well know you can get more money for gas overseas than we are willing (or able) to pay for it locally.

Do the morons in charge really think we are all dills who can’t see through all their propaganda? “Economics and engineering, they should be the two load stars of our national energy policy,” Turnbull said. “We’ve got to get the ideology and the politics out of it.” YOU first Malcolm….. you’re not interested in Australia’s energy security, you just want to kow-tow to the right wing nuts in your party, and maximise your mates’ profits…..

Consumer groups are saying it’s too early to advise people whether to switch away from gas, despite the forecast by the Australian Energy Market Operator of a looming shortage on the country’s east coast. Energy Consumers Australia (ECA) said householders should instead research the most competitive offers available from across the range of energy providers. I think consumers should look at alternative technologies myself. While I constantly discredit solar PV on this blog, the most sustainable form of solar power, solar water heating, is struggling to make inroads these days.

Many moons ago, I ‘met’ this guy on The Conversation who called himself Harquebus…. which is French (more or less) for a flintstock rifle. Why he picked that word as his internet identity, not even I know, but what I do know is that we agreed on nearly everything…! He found me by following the many links to DTM I had left behind, and now, as a result, I get a sort of ‘newsletter’ from him. Here is his latest.

Lots of links, as usual…. enjoy.

Hi all.

We are less than three weeks into the Australian federal election campaign which, was called because the Australian Building Construction Commission legislation could not pass the senate. So far I have not heard it mentioned once. What I have heard ad-nauseam is the slogan, “jobs and growth”.

Our Prime Minister, his deputy and ministers can not string two sentences together without including this slogan. In the myriad of interviews that I have seen so far during this campaign, not one journalist has queried the need for pursuing this destructive ideology.

Rather than create jobs, no one has instead considered reducing populations. Not only would it reduce unemployment and put more in peoples hands and pockets, it will also reduce pollution, environmental destruction, urban sprawl, traffic jams, smog, inequality and poverty etc.

“Jobs and growth” is not being called for by the general population. It is being promoted by the very small minority that benefit from it. The rest of us will suffer from it until the point of no return when, rich and poor alike will perish because of it.

There are no vast habitable expanses left to inhabit, there are no large quantities of easily accessible resources to exploit and there is no cheap and abundant energy left to provide the growth that we have seen these past two centuries.

Every politician using the slogan “jobs and growth” is displaying their ignorance of the exponential function, the limited finite resources that are available to us and the consequences of our attack on the natural world.

Do you really want more traffic jams, more over crowding, more urban sprawl, limited access to resources, more pollution, more inequality, more poverty, more CO2, depleted fish stocks and more unemployment etc. until, we can not sustain ourselves any longer and have to endure the inevitable bloody consequences? This is what those that pursue growth at any cost will bring you.

I urge all journalists on my list, for all of our sake, query this destructive ideology before it is too late. As it is, the damage already done will take centuries to recover, humans surviving or not.

I have included an attachment listing various alternative news sources. A lot are already on my reading list, some I come across regularly and a few I have never heard of before.

If you are turned off by the endless trivia and propaganda being spoon fed to us by the corporate controlled main stream media (MSM), please take a look. The differences between MSM and the alternative media are large.

Here again is my list of various articles along with excerpts.

Avagoodwun.

Cheers.

“a well-established and rarely challenged narrative. “We must grow the economy to produce jobs so people will have the money to grow their consumption, which will grow more jobs…” Grow. Grow. Grow.”“Contrary to the promises of politicians and economists, this growth is not eliminating poverty and creating a better life for all. It is instead creating increasingly grotesque and unsustainable imbalances in our relationship to Earth and to each other.”“Humans now consume at a rate 1.6 times what Earth can provide.”http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36033-why-the-economy-should-stop-growing-and-just-grow-up

“Absolutely NOBODY up at the top EVER talks about what the REAL problems are, Resource Depletion and Population Overshoot. “Growth” is constantly put forth by EVERY candidate of EVERY political persuation Lefty or Righty as the ULTIMATE solution to all problems! We can GROW our way out of debt! The fact this is a finite planet with finite resources is never discussed anywhere except on fringe websites like this one. The reality is we can only solve our problems if we STOP GROWING and START SHRINKING!”
“The difference between “them” and “us” is they are in positions of power where they could effect change. Sadly the only change they wish to effect is to “increase shareholder value” of the corporations they run, and then by extension increase their own compensation packages. It doesn’t matter to them what the consequences are, child slave labor in 3rd World countries, topsoil depletion from unsustainable Industrial Agriculture practices, endangering the safety of the food supply with GMO foods, destroying the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico…none of that matters. All that matters is the bottom line of corporate profits.”http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2016/05/22/who-are-the-we/

“Despite our widespread willful ignorance, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that a consumptive way of living that devours non-renewable “resources” with reckless abandon cannot last.”
“It is the sixth mass extinction event that gets little airtime in our truth suppressed world.”“The planet cannot regenerate itself as quickly as industrial culture is destroying it.”
“If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”http://www.debozarko.com/letting-go/

“new Green technologies designed to save humanity from CO2 may kill humanity through energy starvation”
“If we used more energy to get the energy we need to survive then we will surely perish.”
“ERoEI = energy gathered / energy invested” “net energy = ERoEI-1”
“An inevitable consequence of this aspect of human nature commonly known as greed is that we have already used up the highest ERoEI fossil fuel resources and as time passes the ERoEI of new resources is steadily falling.”“The greatest risk to human society today is the notion that we can somehow replace high ERoEI fossil fuels with new renewable energies like solar PV and biofuels.”http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/

“CO2 brings peak heat within a decade of being emitted, with the effects then lingering 100 years or more into the future.”
“low probability/high impact events such as a rapid release of methane currently stored in permafrost provide as much, if not a greater, urgency to reduce emissions.”http://www.climatecentral.org/news/co2-emissions-peak-heat-18394

“Nature has been wounded too extensively to heal herself. Apocalyptic change has already begun, and our only hope of averting our own imminent extinction is a gamble on geo-engineering.”
“We actually need to go carbon-negative, so that the net effect of our human activities is to take large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. Otherwise the temperature will continue rising rapidly, and will kill us all.”
“it’s astonishing how fast the polar ice, the glaciers, and the mountaintops are all melting now, after being frozen for so many thousands of years. Once they’re all gone, watch out! The rest of the world will start heating up a lot faster.”
“runaway warming has already begun”“We must stop basing our society on buying and selling everything.”https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/runaway-warming/

“You want to cut tax breaks on my fifth investment property? Wah! You won’t give me more corporate tax cuts? Wah! You want working class kids to be able to sit next to my precious darling at university? Wah! Why won’t poor people stop interrupting the experts on Q&A? It’s a communist plot! Wah! Wah! Wah!”
“It’s true that there is a class war in this country. But it is being waged every day of the week against workers and the poor, relentlessly, by these spoilt, entitled born-to-rule brats.”https://redflag.org.au/node/5282

“Almost 2,000 West Papuans were arrested by Indonesian authorities in early May”
“Activists were separated from the main group and put in cells at the main police headquarters. They were beaten – police stamping on their chests and backs and hitting them in the head with rifle butts. They were threatened with death and stripped of their clothes.”https://redflag.org.au/node/5289

“Thanks to a combination of global warming and an El Nino, the planet shattered monthly heat records for an unprecedented 12th straight month, as April smashed the old record by half a degree, according to federal scientists.”
“The last month that wasn’t record hot was April 2015. The last month Earth wasn’t hotter than the 20th-century average was December 1984, and the last time Earth set a monthly cold record was almost a hundred years ago, in December 1916, according to NOAA records.”http://phys.org/news/2016-05-april-12th-month-row-global.html

Go George…… I think his latest writings show a deeper understanding of our predicaments than ever, and we need him as a popular ‘voice’ to spread the truth. Enjoy….

In defending the natural world, we should be honest about our motivations – it’s love that drives us, not money.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th June 2015

Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimmed with rubbish?

Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty.

I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of their bank accounts. Never has a hand appeared. Yet I see the same people base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we don’t protect the natural world.

Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.

I see the encyclical by Pope Francis, which will be published on Thursday, as a potential turning point. He will argue that not only the physical survival of the poor, but also our spiritual welfare depends on the protection of the natural world; and in both respects he is right.

I don’t mean to suggest that a belief in God is the answer to our environmental crisis. Among Pope Francis’s opponents is the evangelical Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has written to him arguing that we have a holy duty to keep burning fossil fuel, as “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”. It also insists that exercising the dominion granted to humankind in Genesis means tilling “the whole Earth”, transforming it “from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city”.

What I mean is that Pope Francis, a man with whom I disagree profoundly on matters such as equal marriage and contraceptives, reminds us that the living world provides not only material goods and tangible services, but is also essential to other aspects of our well-being. And you don’t have to believe in God to endorse that view.

In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves, as Christians put it, surprised by joy: “a happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”

He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living world remains essential to our psychological and physiological well-being. (A paper published this week, for example, claims that green spaces around city schools improve children’s mental performance).

This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy proposes, is that there’s a universal propensity to love it, which may be drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love can be provoked almost immediately, even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature, McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds. Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

Is this a version of the religious conviction from which Pope Francis speaks? Or could his religion be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes provokes in us? Conversely, could the hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament be a response to ecological boredom: the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our psyches?

Of course, this doesn’t answer the whole problem. If the acknowledgement of love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism in others, how do we translate it into political change? But I believe it’s a better grounding for action than pretending that what really matters to us is the state of the economy. By being honest about our motivation we can inspire in others the passions that inspired us.

(Read the essay, or watch the 14 minute video version here in this little box, or on its Youtube page, or full-screen.)

Poverty and war have tormented us for ages, but they won’t for much longer; soon we will be forced to choose between harmony and extinction. Any compromise between those two extremes is nearing an end, because information and ecocide are both growing toward tipping points. And the new vision we need for survival is uncomplicated but also unfamiliar, especially regarding economics.

When people blame the problems of the world on “unregulated capitalism” or “predatory capitalism,” they are implying that capitalism itself is a good and healthy thing. They are implying that we have merely strayed from its sound principles into corruption, a superficial problem that can be cleaned up through reform. But these reformists are mistaken. They have not seen the world as it is; they have not understood what the principles really are. The evils of inequality, externalities, and alienation are inherent in any market economy. To halt the torment and destruction, we’ll have to learn how to share. That didn’t work in some previous attempts, but that just means we’ll have to try doing it differently; the reasons for doing it are still valid. Forcing it on people won’t work, so a change in law won’t be enough; we need a change in culture.

The problem is not “unregulated capitalism.” Writing regulations more carefully will not save us. Satan’s army of lawyers can find him a loophole whenever he wants to escape one of his contracts. And our plutocracy simply disregards its contracts — just look at all of the US government’s violations of its own laws. Money erodes its way through regulations as surely as water finds a way downhill. Any separation between government and big business, between regulators and regulated, is illusory: They share a revolving door, and sometimes a bed. The only way to avoid rule by the wealthy class is to not have a wealthy class.

And fighting against one Monsanto or Halliburton at a time is futile. It’s like Hercules fighting the Hydra: Each time he cut off one head, two more grew in its place. We must look deeper, to what Monsanto’s poisons and Halliburton’s wars have in common.

When Neo awakened from The Matrix, physical reality changed for him, but that film was only a metaphor. When we awaken from the propaganda all around us, physical objects are not changed, but their significance is changed, and our history and expectations are vastly changed.

The old world is dying; we must move on to the new world being born. How will we make the great change? I don’t know the details of that. But it has already begun; you can see it in the peaceful demonstrators being beaten by police. Awareness and understanding are spreading, and our foremost tactic must be to spread them further. When enough people see what is really going on, we will unite, and we will find a way to change things, and the violence will end.

The data in Thomas Piketty’s recent book shows that increasing economic inequality is a normal trend in capitalism, not an aberration. The problem is deeper than debt-based currency or any other particular method of exploitation and theft. It is inherent in all market economies, even barter economies: Market transactions increase inequality, because they favor whichever participant is in the stronger bargaining position. The only way to not have a wealthy class is by not having a market — that is, by sharing.

Increasing inequality is simplified in the board game Monopoly, which always ends with all the players but one totally impoverished. That’s the outcome even if no one cheats, so the problem is in the principles, not in “corruption.”

The recent study by Gilens and Page shows quantitatively that the USA is a plutocracy, not a democracy. Just a few people now own our homes, workplaces, debts, government, mass communications media, everything. Privately owned workplaces are little dictatorships; that’s why we hate Mondays. Progress brings higher productivity, but its benefits are pocketed by the owners of the workplaces; for the rest of us, progress means layoffs, not leisure.

Psychopaths seek positions of power over others, and even people who are not already psychopaths become corrupted by power if they acquire it; strong evidence of that was given by the Stanford Prison Experiment. We see cruelty wherever the opportunity for it arises — in prison guards, police, soldiers, workplace managers, business tycoons, dictators, or even democratically elected politicians — though in that last case, they cover it up by conducting much of their work in secret and lying about the rest. All these bullies proclaim, and perhaps believe, that they are deserving and that their victims are not.

Any market transaction is negotiated by a buyer and a seller, but it may affect other parties besides those two. Such effects are outside the considerations of the negotiations, and so they are called externalities. During the crash of 2008, Wall Street traders often reassured one another with the acronym “IBGYBG,” which stood for “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

Externalities are more due to indifference than outright malice, and so you might think their effects would be random — sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial — but it doesn’t work that way. The proverbial “bull in a china shop” is not motivated by malice, but he is never beneficial.

Market prices are far from true costs, because they leave out the externalities. Thus the market is not at all the “wise and efficient” allocator of resources claimed by its worshipers. Conventional textbooks gloss over this topic, as though it were something minor, but in fact externalities are enormous: War, poverty, and ecocide are inevitable consequences of any market economy. And by the way, the ecocide is a lot worse than most people realize; feedback loops are about to send us over a climate cliff.

A living whale is an awesome creature, but it has no monetary value. The parts of a recently killed whale are worth a million dollars in quick profit to someone who doesn’t care about the consequences elsewhere. That’s why the whales are disappearing. And that’s why the ecosystem is disappearing too, though it’s larger, more abstract, and harder to see.

You might think that the few people in power would get together and conspire to save the planet that they have seized for their own. But that’s not how they’re behaving.

For instance, a few years ago, the Arctic began melting rapidly. That’s one of the climate feedback loops, and it should have been a wakeup call to stop using fossil fuels before they kill everyone. But instead the plutocrats said, “oh goody, now it will be so much easier to extract fossil fuels from the Arctic!”

The market compels its biggest players to compete against each other in offering quick profits to investors, without regard to consequences. Any big players who find scruples will fall behind in the competition, and will be replaced. We need to overthrow not just the big players, but the entire system.

The problem is not just in our rulers. It’s in all of us, in our culture, in the so-called “American dream“: You keep your stuff in your house, I keep my stuff in my house, and God help the guy who doesn’t have a house, because no one else can help him, in our present socioeconomic system. We get the illusion that my well being doesn’t depend on yours, and I don’t need to care about you, and in fact I can’t afford to care about you. We blame the less fortunate for their bad luck, because that’s easier than facing up to the fact that we might be next, that the system is unjust, and that we don’t know how to fix it. We may try to be kind, because that’s human nature, but that’s swimming upstream against the current of separateness.

How blind are we to our own culture? Compare it with physics. An apple’s mass, volume, and colour are objective and measurable traits, independent of any observer. The “owner” of the apple is merely a story that we agree upon, one that can be changed by whoever controls the courts. And yet it has become impossible for us to imagine an apple without an owner.

Our possessions separate us psychologically, and that in turn legitimizes our material separateness. Apathy and alienation seem inevitable and normal. We are forced to compete against each other for survival; friendships become commodities and strategic alliances. We’re distrustful, and our anxiety about lack of security is medically harmful. The wealthy are harmfully stressed too, by their desire to stay ahead, and by their lack of the things that money can’t buy. Lacking meaning, purpose, and direction in our lives, we turn to drugs and entertainments. We see ourselves alone and helpless, and few of us realize that everyone else is alone in much the same way.

No wonder random shootings have become commonplace in our shopping malls. The only thing that can make us safe is a change to a culture in which everyone cares about everyone else and no one gets left behind. But that kind of caring will require sharing. To shelter the homeless and to end the prevalence of sh*t jobs, we’ll have to restructure the entire economy, and we’ll have to change how we feel about one another.

We’ve been told — and some of us have believed it — that it’s human nature to be greedy, selfish, and lazy. We’ve been told that humans work only for private gain, and work well only in competition. We’ve been told that our culture and behaviour can’t change. But none of that is true.

The Fall from Grace was 10,000 years ago, with the invention of the word “mine,” and we’ve lived in its shadow ever since. But throughout the 200,000 years before that, we lived cooperatively, without rulers, sharing everything of importance, and that’s still our deeper nature, our genetic heritage. You can see the cooperation at any traffic merge.

“Half full” and “half empty” are optimistic and pessimistic observations of the same glass. But human nature is not just what we observe. It’s what we choose and aspire to be. Even if the reformists were right — that it is possible to make selfishness viable — why would anyone want to? Right now our culture encourages our worst behaviour; let’s replace it with a culture that brings out our better side.

I’m hoping for a miracle. That doesn’t necessarily involve supernatural intervention; Charles Eisenstein defined a “miracle” to be simply an event that most people believe impossible until it happens. The miracle I’m hoping for — and actually, I believe it is possible, even if a lot of people don’t — is that some good ideas will spread very quickly, and people everywhere will begin sharing and cooperating. That’s the only thing that might still save us from the rapidly accelerating ecocide. Can we shed our cynicism, and see with new eyes, and give each other the inspiration we need?